Hello all,
November is coming quickly, and I intend to take the exciting steps of participating in my first National Novel Writers Month this time around. Tentatively, and with a week left to be certain, I intend to write 60,000 words by the end of the month. This means a minimum of 2,000 words a day, which should take me a tad over two hours at my normal rough drafting pace.
However, I will also be fully diving into some new methods and workflows I have been testing in recent weeks. The individual pieces work well, seemingly enough, though I have been nervous about putting them all together on a project until now. You’re probably aware of the normal hang-ups, wherein I get caught up trying to make everything work perfectly, to the point of making no progress. Here, I hope the demand for progress will urge me to adapt myself perfectly to these changes rather than mold them for me. This will likely cause me to have a slow start to the month. If it were easy, everyone would do it though, right?
So what are these new pieces of my own personal puzzle that I will be working with?
The first and largest improvement to my system will be the new writing software I am using, called Obsidian. Storing my writing in markdown has saved me a lot of space across my devices, and I find when working with huge pages of text it loads significantly faster than Word or Google Docs do. With their minor $4 per month subscription, you can get your files synced across all your devices, as well as having them saved locally. This means I can write all I want on my laptop, phone, or other devices anywhere I want, even without an internet connection, and once I get home those files will be synced across all my devices, which makes it really easy to write comfortably whenever the muse strikes. Obsidian also has an amazing dedicated mod community, who make plugins that allow for some fantastic customization. Currently I am using Word-Smith as my only plugin for easy sorting of files, goal setting and tracking, and exporting of files (Longform was nice for a bit, but got difficult for me to operate on touch screens, so I have stopped using it.)
So Obsidian is the new software, but what about hardware?
Hardware has been an ongoing process for me. To be honest, that was mostly due to my being too stubbornly devoted to Windows operations to want to write on anything else, and so for the longest time my main typewriter of choice was my Surface Laptop 2. It didn’t take long for that operation to show cracks, however. Having access to Steam and my library of games made distractions easy, carrying it out of the house was bulky in its laptop case, and I had to bring its special charger everywhere, which if I’m being honest, is far too large for how slowly it charges the thing (yes I have the one sold by Microsoft, and it started falling apart after about two months of use).
All this to say, I came to roadblock of what to type on, as the laptop became too much of a hassle. After looking at what my ideal piece of tech would be, the iPad Mini jumped out as the only obvious winner.
USB-C charging, the size of an A5 book like I normally carry with me, able to run Obsidian? It seemed crazy to me, but not many other pieces of tech exist out there capable of meeting these three goals alone. Already having an iPhone made it an easy choice.
Here it is pictured with the DTTO Folding Case and the Nillkin Folding Keyboard in my favorite color, the case allowing multiple setup angles for wherever I’m working and the keyboard giving me a nice full-sized layout while still fitting in the A5 size frame.
Altogether, this setup allows me to bring my workspace just about anywhere in my little book case, allowing me to get some words down easily in the morning (getting back on a 4 AM writing schedule, by the way) and fold it all up in a minute and take to work with me. From what I was doing a year ago, I can confidently say I feel leagues more efficient and comfortable with every aspect of my workflow.
Mostly it seems I’ve run out of excuses not to write, which I needed. Thankfully, NaNoWriMo comes just at the right time for me to really push myself and finally put fingers to keys.
And now that I cannot be perfect, I can at least be good.
Leave a Reply